Breakfast with Xolani Gwala

Bruce Whitfield

Bruce graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Rhodes University and has been practicing as a journalist for over two decades.

He has been named Sanlam Financial journalist of the Year in 2014 and Sanlam Radio Financial Journalist of the year in 2014 and 2015. He’s also been crowned Citadel Words on Money Overall Winner for personal finance writing; was named Citi South Africa Financial Journalist of the Year in 2009 and completed a course at New York's famed Columbia Journalism School as part of that programme. Bruce has won numerous other accolades for print, radio and television in the Sanlam and Citadel awards over the past decade as well as multiple wins for best financial broadcaster in the MTN Radio Awards.

Bruce presents The Money Show on 702 and CapeTalk, hosts Tonight with Bruce Whitfield on CNBC Africa and is a columnist and writer for the Sunday Times Business Times. He is also a sought-after public speaker, MC and conference facilitator.

Q: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
First piece of advice I ever got, Jeremy Mags who said, “Don’t mess it up”. Best advice ever and I’ve been distilling that same advice to young radio people for a generation and I keep saying to them don’t mess it up. He was my first boss and I revered the man and don’t mess it up is a mantra.

Q: What is the Upside of Down?
The Upside of Down is all about trying to look through crises and trying to look through the short-term and figuring out what South Africa’s long-term prospects are based on where we’ve come from.

You look at South Africa’s history, 350 years of dispossession and dominance of one race over another and South Africa’s economy, despite all of the politics, despite all of the noise, despite all of the chaos and all of the unfairness in the system that has been in place for 350 years to shock the lights off.

One of the best performing stock markets over the last 100 years, which one? Absolutely right, the JSE! In Dollar terms, the JSE has outperformed the Australian market, the US market. And that is a fact that I will share with you in the Upside of Down.

Q: What are your pre-show routines?
I used to have a very rigid pre-show mantra that involved drinking a can of Red Bull but that made me speak even faster than I normally do. So my pre-show mantra now is usually a sense of abject panic as to whether or not we’ve missed anything and the last 5 minutes of the show is scouring the world to make sure we’ve missed nothing because, on The Money Show, we don’t want to miss a thing.